PRAISE FOR A HOUSE MADE OF WATER
Michelle Lin’s full-length debut is “sequined and jeweled, even if in blood” as it reconciles her position as the daughter of immigrants alongside assimilatory trauma and national legacies. […] Yes, America tends to erase histories that paint it unfavorably, and our own memories tend to repress trauma, but Lin’s work does not allow us that luxury of escape. Erasure is the silent force these poems flow in spite of, or against. [FULL REVIEW]
Raena Shirali, West Branch Wired
In Michelle Lin’s gorgeous debut collection, A House Made of Water, we enter the language of the dream, as if dream-space could produce its own off lexicon, its own wave-like syntax. Lin’s poetry is like a bright bloom after everything has been near dead for so long. If you want to be elevated, if you want to be transported away from the muck of the everyday and into what art can do—that bristling dimension—then read A House Made of Water. It just might save you.
Dawn Lundy Martin, Author of Life in a Box is a Pretty Life
A House Made of Water is a lyrical examination of daughterhood, womanhood, and Asian American identity. Elusive, but tactile, the collection wrestles beautifully with trauma and our inherited stories, seeking transformation throughout. What I love most is the intimacy of detail: the difficult weight of memory, the exquisite relief of disclosure. Michelle Lin’s debut is a document of deep feeling, in the vein of Li-Young Lee and Sylvia Plath, but told in a voice entirely her own.
Cathy Linh Che, Author of SPLIT
Home in A House Made of Water is mythical, cultural, and intimate. Michelle Lin writes like the daughter/exile of that home; someone both buoyed and drowned by its history. In one poem she conjures Aphrodite above the sea and the Little Mermaid beneath it. Another considers the various meanings of “chink.” Lin fuses an outsider’s longing and a native’s self-possession. She is at once spirited and restrained. Her poems are stunning visions of homesickness and escape.”
Terrance Hayes, Author of How to be Drawn
Lin’s collection reveals a nuanced understanding of critical and feminist theories, as well as eclectic interests in dreams, memories, mermaids and video games. Reading House Made of Water is a most challenging yet rewarding experience for Lin’s work is so resistant to traditional narratives and simple resolutions… [FULL REVIEW]
Jenn Lee Smith, Hyphen Magazine
The parts that make up Lin’s story are all present: memory, femininity, family, culture (from dual viewpoints of assimilation and tradition), identity (racial and sexual). But Lin opts to relate the tale in a gloriously Cubist fashion, bending and then offering it back so we’re able to see all its constituent pieces at the same time. In this way, the book’s title—with its built-in contradiction—perfectly represents the material contained therein. This is an account constructed in the most unstable fashion, in fragments and images, yet it somehow holds its shape. [FULL REVIEW]
Dewey N. Fox, Atticus Review
In her titular poem, Michelle Lin writes: “For family, drag three dresses in a tub. Hang them up. Watch them fill with light.” Such is the experience of reading A House Made of Water: the poems here illuminate, with ecstatic precision and depth, the vagaries of family, alienation, the domestic, heartbreak, immigration history, and trauma—they swim deftly through waters “pearled/with grief.” The language enchants with the poet’s lyrical grip, elegiac yet alive: “My instinct with softness is/the same as any other’s—to touch or/to smother. Let me hold you.” These are haunting poems, and they are elevated by wonder, the permutations of pain and joy that make up the experience of living. In A House Made of Water, Michelle Lin has crafted an astonishing, shapeshifting debut.
Sally Wen Mao, Author of Oculus